


redredred

by saintawesome



Category: Barkskins (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-20
Updated: 2020-06-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:54:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24817945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saintawesome/pseuds/saintawesome
Summary: He looks up at her with surprise, with pain, but mostly with the quiet, fearful knowledge that he is dying.
Comments: 14
Kudos: 29





	redredred

**Author's Note:**

> Not the fic I planned to write, but just a short little something that’s been percolating in my head since watching Ep. 8.
> 
> Spoilers for the final episode, obviously.

The man gurgles, clutching the gushing wound in his neck as he collapses sideways off Mr. Goames. The blood spreads over his fingers, staining his skin.

The smell is incredible and Renardette feels her mouth water. The wild rabbit she’d drained two nights ago, sneaking out after Mathilde was asleep, feels more like two weeks. Two years.

But Renardette— not her true name, no, but it is now, just the latest in many names given to her, this time given with love and that’s why she thinks of herself with it— doesn’t have time to think of her thirst.

Mr. Goames lies on the forest floor, pale as the shirt he wears, gasping for air. Blood leaks out the hole in his chest, a ragged, vicious wound that reeks of gunpowder and heartblood. He looks up at her with surprise, with pain, but mostly with the quiet, fearful knowledge that he is dying.

Renardette has been alone too long to remember how to be a girl and not a hungry, feral demon in a girl’s skin. But Mr. Goames has been kind to her. He’d carried her in his arms, surprisingly strong, brought her to Mathilde, who loves her as her own. Mr. Goames, who is filled with righteousness, who loves Mathilde’s prune tart and who, like her, doesn’t remember how to smile.

She has never taken a Childe. She was one, once, long ago. Just a girl when her Maker came to her family’s hut and spirited her away in the night, when she stopped being a child and became a Childe. She doesn’t like to think of her Maker, the bond he’d forced between them, the bond she’d destroyed when she ripped his head off and burned his corpse. 

Mr. Goames looks at her with those enormous eyes, glassy with pain, clouding with confusion, and Renardette smiles at him as best she knows.

 _My Childe_ , she thinks, trying the words out. _Mine. My own. Mineminemine_. The word doesn’t hurt as much as it once did. 

Mr. Goames’s— _Hamish_ , she thinks, _my Childe, mine_ — breathing is more labored, ragged and harsh. She draws the arrowhead down her wrist and blood spills from the shallow wound.

 _My own_ , she thinks, and there’s a warmth inside of her, like when Mathilde combs her hair, like when she holds Bouchard the rabbit in her lap and he sniffs her with his soft nose. _My Childe_.

Renardette presses her bleeding wrist to her Childe’s slack mouth. “Drink,” she orders. She pets his sweaty, pale face with her other hand, touches her thumb to the shadows under his eyes, the black fan of his lashes. Now, on the edge of death, the stern line of his brow has been softened by pain and fear.

Her Childe’s lips close around the wound, her blood on his tongue, and Renardette smiles.


End file.
